When Do People Support Corrupt Politicians?: Experimental Evidence from China

• In Event: Corruption and Electoral Behavior

Abstract

Existing studies have revealed a puzzling fact: Citizens sometimes support corrupt politicians more than clean ones. One possible explanation is that citizens usually correlate corruption with high competence. To rigorously examine the competence-corruption trade-off, we conduct a national survey experiment in China, where the ruling party’s recent anti-corruption has led bureaucrats to be less corrupt, but also less willing to take innovative measures – some of which may be risky - to promote local economic growth. China observers have blamed the slack-off for the country’s recent economic downturn and declining governance quality. Precisely, we experimentally manipulate the descriptions of an anonymous bureaucrat: corrupt or clean, capable or incapable, and low or high ranking. Then, we randomly assigned respondents to hear one of the eight different configurations of attributes of the bureaucrat and ask for their approval for such bureaucrat. If the competence-corruption trade-off is valid, we expect citizens to have a higher approval of a capable bureaucrat with corruption history than that of an incapable bureaucrat with no corruption history. Beyond the competence-corruption trade-off, our design also allows an investigation of the heterogeneous treatment effect conditional on the rank of politicians and characteristics of respondents.

Authors

• Lin ZHU, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Feng Yang, University of California, Los Angeles